ABOUT A BOY: Jason Katims, Minnie Driver, and David Walton on Romances, Poker, and More

On tonight’s brand new episode of ABOUT A BOY, Will’s poker game is crashed by an unexpected guest: Fiona! (And she is in addition to a mini-PARENTHOOD crossover with Dax Shepard’s Crosby.)

“Fiona invites herself to Will’s poker game,” ABOUT A BOY creator Jason Katims previewed. “We see a totally different side of Fiona, which we’re all really excited about.”

And while viewers learn more about Fiona, Will will continue to romance Adrianne Palicki’s Samantha.

“She’s going to do an arc,” Katims previewed of Palicki, whom he worked with on FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS (where she played Tyra). “She’s in a lot of episodes from here to the end of the season. She’s not in every single one, but she continues…to the end of the season. She’s in a lot of the episodes. We’ve just been watching that relationship develop over time and it’s been great. She’s been doing such a wonderful job, and it’s so great. I wanted to work with Annie again since FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, and I’ve been looking for opportunities to do it. So I was so thrilled she was available and interested in doing this.”

But if you’ve been holding out for a Will to realize Sam isn’t the girl for him, and perhaps start looking at Fiona, romantically — and both David Walton (Will) and Minnie Driver (Fiona) noted they have fans who have been questioning them when their characters are going to get together — it seems you’ll have to wait quite a bit longer.

“It doesn’t seem right at the moment,” Walton admitted.

“I don’t think what people realize they’re attracted to is that anticipation,” Driver added. “And maybe we’ve lost that in this world of instant gratification, where everything is paid off right away…Look how fun it was to watch MOONLIGHTING: that unfold, and unfold, and unfold, and unfold. You get caught up in the unfolding of it. And if there is a payoff, even if it’s a disaster and turns out to be a mistake and you start again, it’s still really fun to play the process of it. I think it’s good to keep people guessing, I think it’s good people want it, and I think it’s good they don’t get it.”

That delay, however, could make for some interesting storytelling.

“I think the idea that the rest of the world watching around them sees something they don’t see in each other is really interesting to me,” Katims said. “From a writers perspective, it gives you the potential to tell the story very slowly. If this were a love story between these two people — and I don’t really think of it that way, so I’m not saying it is, but if it were — because they’re starting in a place where they’re so not in the frame of mind, either one, that the other one would ever be anyone they were interested in, they’re able to [work] things out very slowly…there’s a way you can watch that story evolve in a way…that feels very deliberate.”